Papers of William Croswell

William Croswell (1760-1834; Harvard AB 1780, AM 1786) was a Boston cartographer, educator, and Harvard Library cataloger.

Croswell was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1760 as the youngest son of Rebecca Holmes and Andrew Croswell (1708/9-1785; Harvard AB 1728). Croswell received an AB from Harvard in 1780 and following his graduation, he worked as an assistant at the Boston Latin School until August 1782. In November 1782, Croswell commenced teaching mathematics and navigation privately in Boston, and traveled to New York between 1795 and 1797 to find work as a teacher.

While working as a teacher, Croswell also began circulating publication proposals for scientific works, and in 1791, he published Tables for Readily Computing the Longitude by the Lunar Observations. In December 1806, Croswell traveled to England where he attempted to garner support for the publication of a celestial map and also continued to work as a teacher. He returned to Boston in the fall of 1809, and his map, A Mercator Map of the Starry Heavens, Comprehending the Whole Equinoctial, and Terminated by the Polar Circles, was published in 1810.

In 1812, the Harvard Corporation employed Croswell to work on a catalog of the University's library holdings. Disabled by psychological issues and illness, Croswell's work on the Library Catalogue was slow and interrupted by absences. In March 1819, a Harvard Corporation committee recommended that funding of the cataloging project should be ended and Croswell's employment terminated in July 1819. Following the committee's report, Croswell began petitioning the Corporation for extensions, and continued in the position until March 1821, when the Corporation demanded he surrender his working documents on the catalogue.

Following Croswell's dismissal from Harvard, he returned to Boston and began a thirteen-year unsuccessful campaign to collect on unpaid wages he felt he was owed by Harvard for his library work. He continued his earlier efforts to publish his scientific work and tried fruitlessly to gain acknowledgment from the larger academic community. Throughout Croswell's life, he had suffered from sensitivity to noise, paranoia, and poor health, and his mental and physical infirmities were compounded by reclusiveness and continued poverty in his old age. Croswell died on July 7, 1834.